Nancy’s Blog

From Jeff Greenwald – I want to see this a couple of years ago at Freight and Salvage, and it was terrific. (He’s also going to be at Google, of all places, in April.) Jeff is mostly a travel writer. The performance I saw, he uses a big roulette wheel with topics; someone turns the wheel and he tells a story based on what topic comes up. Jeff’s been everywhere and tells terrific stories.

Dear Friends, Colleagues, and Fellow Travelers,

Great news for theater lovers and globe spinners! My solo performance in praise of wanderlust — Strange Travel Suggestions — returns to the stage next Thursday, for a month-long run at The Marsh in San Francisco. There will be shows every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday eve, at 8 pm, from April 3rd through April 26th (except for 4/19). That’s a mere 11 nights, in the upstairs Marsh theater, which seats just 75 people. So if you’d like to come — and I hope you will! — please get your tickets early!

Reservations can be made on The Marsh website: http://www.themarsh.org/strange_travel.html

The show is lots of fun, always different, and always an adventure. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Update: articles and comments about Greenwald in the SF Chron here and here.

From today’s NY Times: Research found a negative correlation between Czech ornithologists’ beer consumption with their publications and citations.

Of course, maybe this is only ornithologists…or Czechs…but do grad students and untenured faculty want to take this risk?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, probably the best source of data on Americans’ use of the internet and related technlogies, has released a new report: Mobile Access to Data and Information.

A personal note: I love having internet access on my cellphone. I use it to check email, and to do searches. Often when I’m out and around I check on addresses, business hours, and other information that makes my life easier. I use Google Maps for directions. I’ll even check book reviews while I’m in a bookstore.

I feared that having email on my phone would tether me to email,  but instead it frees me from my computer.  For example, I can recheck details on a meeting while in transit, or check for updates from someone I’m supposed to be meeting.  And I can do email during interstitial time.  It’s too hard to key long notes, but often all I do is delete unnecessary email or key a short reply.

From Pew:

Some 62% of adult Americans have taken advantage of mobile access to digital data and tools. The Pew Internet Project’s new report, entitled Mobile Access to Data and Information, examines mobile access in two ways and finds that:

58% of adult Americans have used a cell phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) to do at least one of ten mobile non-voice data activities, such as texting, emailing, taking a picture, looking for maps or directions, or recording video.

41% of adult Americans have logged onto the internet on the go, that is, away from home or work either with a wireless laptop connection or a handheld device.

Overall, 62% of adult Americans have either accessed the internet with a wireless connection away from home or work or used a non-voice data application using their cell phone or PDA, according to the Pew Internet Project’s December 2007 survey.

The New York Times reports that Buffy is back in a comic book series created by Buffy’s creator, Josh Whedon. The series is titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 and picks up Buffy’s story after the TV series finale. The New York Times got interested because in issue #12 Buffy finds herself in bed with one of the other slayers — i.e., a woman. Well, why not. She’s slept with two vampires. Even when she fell in love with her straight-arrow TA in college, it turned out he had an embedded device that put him under the control of a military project aimed at harnessing demons and creating a super-bad Frankenstein. The only ordinary male she ever slept with was a one-night stand in college. So a female vampire slayer is pretty tame.